November 22, 2021

“How Come Nobody Tells Us This?”

“How Come Nobody Tells Us This?” Esteban Ramos works at his computer at his home. (Photo from the Ramos family)

16-year-old Esteban Ramos’s fateful encounter with school police officers two years ago was an eye-opening experience.

“[Esteban] did everything wrong,” said Wendy Ramos, Esteban’s mother. “He did not recognize authority, so when he was asked to stop, he ran.”

Esteban continued to run even as the officer chased him and repeated his order to stop. When the officer caught up to and restrained a struggling Esteban, the situation escalated dramatically. 

“The officer kept telling him to stop because he knew he was a student, but Esteban kept yelling threats and telling him that he was going to kill him, and then he reached for the police officer’s gun.” 

For most of his life, Esteban has struggled with the unique challenges of living with high-functioning autism. Recognizing and responding to authority is something that is difficult for him and other individuals with the same challenges. Fortunately, his brush with the authorities was safely deescalated by school police, but Mrs. Ramos holds no illusions as to how close she came to losing her son.

“He could have been shot,” she said.

Oftentimes, people with Autism and other mental disorders are not as lucky as Esteban. Deaths of individuals on the spectrum at the hands of law enforcement is a global issue that affects people across the globe, from the United States to Palestine. Recent statistics indicate that more than one in five people fatally shot by police have some kind of mental disability.

When Esteban’s parents sat down with him to explain how he could have better handled the incident, he had only one question for them.

“Well, how come nobody tells us this?”

Esteban had no prior training when it comes to interacting with police, and after his experience, he realized how important such training is for him and for others like him.

“It’s necessary for people with Autism to communicate with law enforcement and first responders effectively,” Esteban said.

Bearing this in mind, Esteban decided to undertake a project of his own to ensure that his experience could be avoided by others struggling with mental disabilities. With the support of his mother, Esteban is in the process of creating training videos to help individuals on the spectrum understand how to safely interact with law enforcement. The videos utilize a unique learning method designed for people with Autism.

“The videos are based on a formal curriculum called Video Modelling,” said Esteban’s mother. “It’s been researched for a couple of decades already. The idea is that it is easier for a person with a mental disability to concentrate on a video, and they have to see a video of a person interacting correctly with law enforcement. 

She explained that they oftentimes have to watch the video enough times to know exactly what they are supposed to do.

“Once they can learn that, then the second step is to go into roleplay, so in their own classroom they can roleplay the scenarios that they learned in the video. Once they know how to act it and roleplay it, then they are filmed doing the exact same thing that they saw in the video, but they have to be successful at doing it. Research shows that it is easier for people with Autism to learn this way,” Mrs. Ramos said.

In addition to creating interactive curricula for individuals on the spectrum, Esteban and Mrs. Ramos are also in the process of making other training videos designed for law enforcement.

“He also wants to bring awareness on Autism to police, since they only get eight hours of training on interacting with people with mental disabilities.” Mrs. Ramos said.

Esteban’s concern that police training doesn’t adequately prepare law enforcement to safely interact with individuals on the spectrum is shared by many disability rights activists. But with these training videos, Esteban hopes to both assist individuals on the spectrum in effectively communicating with police and help law enforcement understand the unique challenges and perspectives of individuals on the spectrum.

“Autism gives me a different view on the world,” Esteban said, “But I know that God made me who I am for a reason.”